ABSTRACT
This paper will reconsider the old view that navies in general, and the Royal Navy in particular, were opposed to the introduction of new technology in the nineteenth century. Through a case study of one critical technology, the screw propeller, it is possible to see how the play of politics, strategy, economics, technology and patent law influenced the process. This analysis will provide a sharp contrast with the narrow, self-serving or adulatory polemics produced by contemporary engineers and their hagiographers. It does not diminish Brunei, Francis Pettit Smith and John Ericsson, to name but three, to discover that their motivations were fame and money, rather than the ‘benefit of civilization’ so often claimed. Their naval contemporaries were more astute. Charged with professional responsibility for the security of a global empire they could not afford to reject progress. Instead they harnessed the intellectual and engineering resources of the private sector to bring new technologies to production readiness. In the process they were more likely to defraud the engineers than ignore them.
